Workfront Overhaul and potential impact

[lmcintron]

Hi all

I'm a newly appointed system administrator for our Workfront instance, which has been in use for over a decade.  We are looking to overhaul our configuration and eliminate any unnecessary technical debt.  However, we have been cautious about making changes due to concerns about the potential impact on our existing data, including historical information, permissions, reports, groups, teams and more. 

If someone has been through something like this and has any suggestions, lessons learned, be careful when..., etc.  please let me know.  

Thank you!

[Lyndsy-Denk]

I'm interested to hear what you mean by "technical debt."

Having inherited an aged and loosely managed instance in the past, I learned a few things along the way. I'll start with the soft tactics:

• It's important to talk to your users to get an idea of what they use and don't use.
• Communicate to make sure folks know that change is coming and have a clear avenue for reaching out to you if they need something or have feedback on the process and results.
• Take a baseline satisfaction survey now and then repeat that survey later to get an idea how well your cleanup effort went and justify all that effort to your leadership.

When it comes to the system itself:

• Use your sandbox to test the implications on data before doing the mass work.
• Clearly understand what you can and can't restore. For objects you can't restore, you can "soft delete" and if no one comes crying to find that object, delete it later. There are two ways I soft delete and sometimes I use them in tandem:
  • Rename the object to something like "SCHEDULED FOR DELETION IN Q3 2025".
  • Unshare the object except for admin.
• Run all the reports possible to get an idea of usage numbers. For example, I have a reports view that helps me understand the last time a report was viewed, who last viewed it, and how many time a report was viewed in the last month, quarter, and year.
• Moving objects can have consequences to the data. Custom fields can help "lock" data in place. For example, to preserve historical requestor data, we use custom fields to capture the requestor's Home Group and Home Team. This gives us the freedom to move users around as they take new roles or reorgs happen, but still report on, for example, where requests came from last year.
• Many admins have strong opinions—and for good reason—around whether you should ever delete data from Workfront. I recommend convening a committee of colleagues to discuss. Refer to any retention policy your company may have. Consult leadership. For aged instances, there might be value in deleting the really old stuff, but deletion is deletion. I've been considering for almost 3 years whether I should delete a bunch of custom form fields because, good lord, there are so many in our instance.

I imagine other admins have some lessons to share. This is just my Monday morning dump.